Hugh Mackay Quotes

If American schooling is inadequate now, just imagine how much more obsolete it will be when today's kindergarten students graduate from high school in just 12 years.

We have fallen into the bad and unquestioned habit of thinking that our educational system is broken, but it is working on all cylinders. What our educational system aims to produce is cultural amnesia, a wholesale lack of curiosity, history-less free agents, and educational goals composed of content-free processes and unexamined buzz-words like “critical thinking,” “diversity,” “ways of knowing,” “social justice,” and “cultural competence.”

Who's going to be against making sure students have the education for a knowledge economy?

I am very proud of the quality of public education in Nebraska, but I believe we have an obligation to continually assess whether our system is meeting 21st Century education needs.

Sometimes, reading a blog, which I do infrequently, I see that generations of Americans have been wilfully crippled, and can no longer spell or write a sentence.

The teacher is commodified, the school is a shop, the subjects are consumer goods. To read, to think, to reflect, isn't a question of want, it's a question of need.

Our education system was developed for an industrial era where we could teach certain skills to our children and they were able to use these skills for the rest of their lives working productively in an industry.

We have to build a better education in this country. We need to step it up.

A wise system of education will at last teach us how little man yet knows, how much he has still to learn.

What passes for a curriculum in today's schools is little else than a strategy of distraction... It is largely defined to keep students from knowing themselves and their environment in any realistic sense; which is to say, it does not allow inquiry into most of the critical problems that comprise the content of the world outside the school.

I absolutely believe in the power of innovative entrepreneurship on every level. That's why I am exploring ways to improve our education system by making it as effective as a private tutor and as engaging as video games.

Education to me is the most important thing that we've got going in this country. I mean, a lot of my family are teachers. I was the recipient of a great public education, and I see that's one of the first things that we're going to go, 'What are we going to raise?' The ignorant masses.

I don't think anybody anywhere can talk about the future of their people or of an organization without talking about education. Whoever controls the education of our children controls our future.

I'd repair our education system or replace it with something that works.

I'm no politician. I'm an historian who has learned through a lifetime of studying that nothing in the world beats universal education.

I believe primary and secondary education is the bedrock of any sustainable society.

Because the stuff that they feed kids now, they'll have a bunch of idiots in the next millennium as far as art and culture is concerned.

If Russians knew how to read, they would write me off.

The foundation of every state is the education of its youth.

If the education of our kids comes from radio, television, newspapers - if that's where they get most of their knowledge from, and not from the schools, then the powers that be are definitely in charge, because they own all those outlets.

For any reporter, education is a topic where everything else - money, politics, et cetera - intersects. I have four kids in K through 12, so I'm knee-deep in it. I'm really interested in the philosophy behind it all. Should you just memorize your multiplication tables, or should you understand the concept behind them?

Public schools helped create the idea of America and inculcate Americans with a few rudiments of knowledge. To judge by that very American item, the Internet, a few rudiments is all anyone cares to have.

Education reform has as its main purpose to make sure that the education delivered is of quality.

We're going to have the best-educated American people in the world.

Schools still operate as if all knowledge is contained in books, and as if the salient points in books must be stored in each human brain - to be used when needed. The political and financial powers controlling schools decide what these salient points are.